Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (13 page)

“Arresting Fallahian would have been too much to hope for, but pressuring him was not. Bonn should not have accepted the visit. If this indeed proves to be a government-sanctioned killing, all diplomatic ties must be cut off. I hope everyone working on this case can remain independent and not allow the voice of the
higher masters
to echo in their heads. If this trial moves forward the way it should, it can prevent other such assassinations from taking place.”

To the chorus of criticism, the exiles added their voices in the way they knew best. They issued a flyer calling for a demonstration and posted it on the entrance of their businesses in Berlin—cafés, grocery stores, restaurants, and travel agencies. Its tone captured the tenor of a people searching for a voice.

A CALL TO ALL

Fellow Free-Thinking Iranians!

More than a year since the four opposition members were murdered at the Mykonos restaurant by the elements of the regime, the accused will finally stand trial at 9 a.m. on the morning of Thursday, October 28, 1993. In light of certain recent visits, it is incumbent upon us to condemn the efforts of some German politicians who, directly or indirectly, wish to influence the outcome. There will be a protest march in front of the courthouse where the trial will be held.

Warning: According to the office of the chief federal prosecutor’s instructions, anyone wishing to attend the trial must present a valid ID or passport.

Organized by: The Organization in Defense of Refugees

Place: Northern corner of Turm between Rathenauer and Wilsnaker, reachable by UBahn #9: Turm Street stop

Starting time: 8:00 a.m. on October 28, 1993

That morning, Shohreh’s thirteen-month lethargy lifted. She awoke to find herself looking ahead to the breaking day. A strange energy percolated in her veins. Fear, anticipation, and excitement had fused and revived her battered spirit. In the lightless universe where she had been adrift, there was a glimmer at last.

Against all logic, she felt certain that those who had killed her husband were mighty enough to blow up the court and everyone inside it, including her. What she most wanted to prevent would come true: Sara would become an orphan. Yet not even for Sara’s sake could she keep away from the court. She could not expect others to brave what she would not brave herself. So the night before, she visited two of Noori’s old colleagues and signed Sara’s custody over to them, just in case.

The promise of the trial had uplifted her, though she had no hope of victory. She wanted the chance to shame her husband’s killers, to show herself standing—unafraid and defiant—before the inevitable secret deal between Iran and Germany would knock her off her stand. Her expectations of the trial were dismal. She had never seen the inside of a courtroom. What she knew of it was what she had seen in the movies—all ceremony and no soul. She expected a corrupt, corpulent, ill-tempered and wigged man to knock a gavel on a bench from time to time. The rumors that Darabi had retained Berlin’s best attorneys terrified her. Besides, she could not fathom Fallahian having left Germany without a prize to boast of at home. A deal had already been made, she told Ehrig the day the news of the visit broke.

“Germany is a democracy,” he assured her. “No one here, no matter how mighty, is above the law.” She had not challenged him, only flashed a deferential smile, but pitied his guileless confidence.

For Sara, all of the mother’s cynicism came undone. Shohreh was all enthusiasm when describing the trial to her daughter. A fairy tale was about to unfold: The accused—wretched, tattered, and surely remorseful—could only hope for leniency because their guilt would be a foregone conclusion. The unforgiving judge—Solomon disguised as a middle-aged German—would instantly see through their wickedness. Just as instantly, the attorneys for the accused—acned, avaricious, and stuttering to boot—would be unanimously loathed. Whereas their attorneys, noble and winsome, would
triumph within weeks if not days and ride with them in a chariot into the sunset. Sara delighted in her mother’s tale, and never questioned the plausibility of a chariot on Berlin’s busy streets, or the significance of sunset, which, being too young to know Hollywood endings, signaled only bedtime to her. She set off for school that morning, barely fitting into her own skin.

Shohreh stared into her wardrobe. She did not want to look like a casual observer. The court would be her battlefield and she was dressing for combat. She needed armor, not mere clothes. She took her black skirt and sweater set off the hanger once again. Black, all black, from head to toe, would be her uniform for as long as the trial would last. Black, not simply as a symbol of her grief, but as the essence of the truth, the absoluteness of her need for justice.

She set out for the courthouse. The highest security measures had been put in effect for the opening day of the trial. All traffic within a one-mile radius of the building had been diverted since dawn. All vehicles, even bicycles, were banned from parking nearby. Antiriot vans had been stationed in the neighborhood. Police officers, grenades clipped to their waists, guarded the area. The local shopkeepers—pawnbroker, Turkish restaurateur, legal bookseller—locked their doors and watched the frenzy from inside. There was no view of the main doors, only the backs of the crowd wishing to get inside. The queue snaked around the block. Dozens of reporters were on the steps pointing their microphones in the direction of the attorneys as they passed by. A few were interviewing the expatriates in the queue.
Shohreh arrived flanked by two attorneys so she would not face the mayhem alone.

The eight o’clock march was on. Nearly two hundred exiles were milling about waiting to begin, intently watching the movements of the wiry, quick-footed man who commanded them. There were still placards to hand out, banners to unfurl, order to bring to the disarrayed ranks. Moments before the strike of eight, many were chasing him with their last-minute questions. But Hamid Nowzari, a veteran orgaqnizer, simply raised the bullhorn to his mouth and shouted the first slogan:

His left fist revolved in the air several times, and the marchers quickly gathered in a circle in the middle of Turm Street. They marched and chanted, settling into the rhythm of their orderly rebellion. Pausing at the entrance, Shohreh waved to the marchers and exchanged a grateful glance with Hamid. Years ago, she and Hamid had founded a group to see new refugees through their difficult time of transition. Now that group had come to see her through a difficult time of her own.

When the cast of attorneys cleared the front stairs, the reporters turned to the marchers. Their savvy conductor, aware of the attention, quickly changed the slogan. He raised his right hand and half the crowd shouted,
Where are the killers?

Then he turned to his left—they erupted in an answer,
Hiding in Tehran!

The reporters’ pens rushed across their notepads. The red light of the rolling cameras blinked. Inside the building, the trial was about to begin. Outside on the street, the verdict was already in.

14

Iran is a nation with 2,500 years of history and an incurable forty-five-minute delay.

—Hadi Khorsandi, exiled Iranian satirist

If the venue was any indication, then the Mykonos trial was destined to be one of the continent’s greatest trials. It was to be held in the largest courtroom of its kind in Europe, Berlin’s High Criminal Court. Under the gilded entrance arch, there is a courtyard of white marble columns rising from a red granite floor and encircling a grand staircase. Daylight streamed in through an oval-shaped window at the midway landing of the stairs, perhaps an architectural metaphor—an all-seeing eye, not of God, but of law.

The interior of the courthouse affected the viewer the way great cathedrals do—invoking reverence. But in Moabit court, reverence and awe were reserved for justice. The
ornate, vaulted ceilings, the statues of sword-bearing warriors against the walls, the painted panes of glass at the end of the corridors, and the recurring columns flanking the antechambers that overlooked the courtyard created a beauty, whose vastness dwarfed the viewer. What the kaiser, Wilhelm II, had envisioned as “the Palace of Justice” in the late 1800s was a building that would symbolize the power of his government. A century later, the Iranian expatriates entering it were daunted by its regal quality—by the luster of a tradition whose substance they had yet to know or trust.

The daily drama inside the building matched its appearance. Four million files circulated through the halls. Three hundred judges worked and oversaw hundreds of staff serving them. Much of that work was still being done the way it was in the late nineteenth century. Sacks of mail arrived in the mailroom every morning, where clerks stamped each piece and distributed them through numerous small cubbies. Larger correspondence was placed in bins and rolled to their destinations through the tiled corridors. Deep in the building’s underbelly was a warehouse, a legal bazaar of sorts. In its 1,400-square-meter space, knives and guns lay alongside locks of hair and soiled handkerchiefs; a depository of all the evidence presented in the trials over the years: 1906—the trial of a Berlin man who, disguising himself as a policeman, had massacred an entire neighborhood; 1967—the trial of the city police officers accused of shooting Benno Ohnesorg, the German student bystander killed at a demonstration against Iran’s Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; 1977—the trials of the members of the terrorist group Red Army Faction; 1992—the
trials of the Communist leaders of the former East Germany. To know the history of the Moabit courthouse was to know the history of a nation’s struggle for civility.

The building’s main entrance was reserved for staff, attorneys, reporters, witnesses, and members of the victims’ families. Audience members entered, if they got to enter at all, through an ordinary backdoor that opened onto a labyrinth of dusty, graffiti-riddled stairways, each leading to a different courtroom. Surveillance at the threshold was punishing, to deter casual and undetermined visitors. Security officers gathered the contents of the visitors’ pockets into small bins. The wands traced the outline of the incoming bodies, then the hands retraced the same path so thoroughly that it brought color to the subjects’ cheeks. Shoes and socks came off next, where some spectators hid a pen and a piece of paper, hoping to circumvent the ban on note taking during the proceedings. Those who intended to remain in the courtroom for the whole day swore off liquids of all kinds since a trip to the lavatory required reentry and a repeat of the grueling process.

The Mykonos trial was assigned to Hall 700, the largest of the courtrooms, the one reserved for the most notable cases. In daytime, the room was drenched in iridescent light that streamed in through the stained-glass wall. Even at night, at its most empty, Hall 700 was not a quiet room, for the sounds of the busy street below seeped in through the glass wall. Two grand chandeliers, each a round beam of eighteen vertically conjoined gold and opaque cups, lit the room but they lit most brightly the moss-colored tables beneath. Placed
side-by-side and dotted with microphones, the tables were for the team of six Arab and Persian translators. Behind them, at either side, two bulletproof glass cages were built for the defendants. The cages were the first alterations that Hall 700 had undergone in many decades.

That Thursday morning of October 28, 1993, the judges stepped through their cloakroom and arrived at the bench. Everyone rose. Chief Judge Kubsch sat in the center, his deputy and his reporter on his either side.

Germany’s judiciary was a rigorous enterprise that shunned frills and flair. It disappointed those seeking fame and glory, rewarded only modesty and hard work. The judges were not political appointees, and so less vulnerable to outside influence. They were career professionals who had chosen to become judges upon graduation from law school. They were evaluated by their peers, promoted only for merit according to standards set by those peers. In its anonymity, becoming a judge was like choosing priesthood; in severity, it was like serving in the army.

There was no jury in Judge Kubsch’s courtroom. The fate of the trial would not depend on the random assortment of laymen. Nor was there the worry that those deciding the case might not be able to duly understand and assess the facts. Nothing could be confusing to, or misunderstood by, a team of professionals. Therefore, no evidence had to be excluded. The five judges who entered the court that morning would not play referee to two dueling sides. Dueling sides do not exist where the prosecutor is an impartial investigator. These judges had studied the case closely for weeks and come to ask
their own questions and make their own judgments. They conducted the proceedings not with the decorous formalities of most other courtrooms, but with the fluidity of a debate. Interruptions and interjections, even by the defendants, regarded as contempt elsewhere, were mostly tolerated in the trial where Judge Kubsch and his team presided.

Once everyone had settled into their seats, the chief judge set the routine he would follow at the start of each session. He leaned into his microphone and announced, “Today we begin hearings on case number 2StE2/93.”

Then he looked to his right where Bruno Jost and his deputy sat, dressed in their crimson robes. He acknowledged Jost.

“The prosecution is present.”

Then he took stock of the defendants in the glass cages and added, “The defendants are present.”

Next, he turned to the team of lawyers for the accused.

“The counsels are here.”

And lastly, he nodded to the court translators stationed at the foot of his bench, and reminded them, “The interpreters are also present and abide by their oath to translate accurately and truthfully.”

Shohreh sat beside Ehrig. Across from her, clad in black robes, were twelve attorneys representing the accused. The more animated and flamboyant of the accused, Yousef and two other accomplices, were quarantined in one glass cage against the wall she faced. Behind her, Darabi and Rhayel sat in another glass cage. At the far end of the hall, beyond a wooden parapet, several rows of benches were allocated to reporters and spectators. The small balcony above them,
once used by the kaiser when he dropped in to observe a trial, had been cordoned off.

On that first day, the audience section was filled to capacity. Seventy viewers, friend and foe—Iranians who knew the dead seated alongside the Lebanese relatives of the accused. For the Iranians, the trial was a bittersweet occasion of both shame and relief. On display before the public’s eye was the ordeal that had driven them into exile. There was shame in all that had emerged, but the attention was anodyne. They had not come expecting to win or lose. They had not come expecting anything. Being in that room, their long-standing suffering was receiving its due. Being there, alone, vindicated them, lifted and uplifted them. They had come not knowing what the next day would bring. For all they knew, the first day could be the last. That such a day had come at all was what mattered to them.

The opening day the attorneys for the defense steered the course of the proceedings. They entered a series of motions asking to postpone the trial. They claimed not to have had enough time to fully study the case. They accused the prosecution of not having surrendered all the evidence. They argued that the trial had been founded on faulty charges made in a misguided indictment. Quoting “the most knowledgeable man in the republic,” they repeated the words of Bernd Schmidbauer: “Those who know the facts would draw vastly different conclusions.”

The trial could not begin, these attorneys argued, until the court had heard from Bernd Schmidbauer. The judges granted
the defense’s demand by issuing a subpoena for Germany’s chief of intelligence. But the trial would not stop for a single witness. The court resumed and then again yielded to new motions. Each time Judge Kubsch called for a recess, the five judges rose, their black chairs swiveling in their wake, and marched to their spartan chamber to consult. What lessened the day’s boredom for the audience, on whom the legal details in debate were lost, were the intermittent howls of Yousef complaining of a toothache. Finally, Chief Judge Kubsch adjourned to allow Yousef to go to the infirmary. So ended the lackluster day that had begun with so much promise.

The interruptions continued into the second day. Each time the chief judge called on Jost to recite his indictment, the attorneys for the accused entered yet another motion to delay the opening. Once, even Jost himself refused to begin.

From his corner of the courtroom, the prosecutor had spotted Parviz, one of his key witnesses, in the audience, whose presence prior to testifying would have compromised him as a witness. Jost told the judge that he could not begin with a certain spectator inside the courtroom. Before the judge asked the person’s name, Parviz walked out.

By the afternoon, Judge Kubsch’s supply of patience had dried up. In his mild yet firm manner, he rejected all other motions. He called on Jost to begin. When the prosecutor finally finished reciting the indictment, the trial had truly begun.

The first witness debuted just as he had last promised. “Everything I’ve said so far has been a lie, but today I’m going to tell the truth,” Yousef Amin bellowed from the witness
stand, then, addressing Judge Kubsch he added, “I’ve been saving it for you, Judge.”

He pointed to the bulletproof glass cage where Rhayel and Darabi sat and shouted as the voices of the translators trailed his, “Those are not the real killers. The real killers are a team of Iraqi Kurds still out there, on the loose.”

When the judges asked why he had lied before, Yousef blamed the investigators.

“They tried to trick me. You’d think I was an ambassador the way they were treating me at first. They gave me money, put me up in a hotel, and promised me stuff,” then, turning dramatically toward his old friends, he continued, “If only I named the good men over there.”

That afternoon, the witness told a story far more amusing than deft. He was the hero of his own legend, a victim of cunning interrogators. He had resisted valiantly until they were driven to rage. After losing any hope of his surrender, the mask had fallen from their evil faces and they had begun abusing him. What blame still remained, he placed at the feet of his translators, who did not have proper mastery of either Arabic or the particular dialect he spoke, or they were merely spies.

“Spies, you say, Mr. Amin?” one judge asked.

“Yes! Two hundred percent spies, Judge. With ID cards and everything. I saw their badges with my own eyes,” he replied.

On the second day of his testimony, Yousef took the drama to new heights. Returning to the stand, he accused his attorney of both incompetence and spying for several Western intelligence services at once. If the contradiction
in his claim was obvious to Yousef, he showed no sign of it. He refused to speak as long as his attorney remained in the room.

Yousef’s chief counsel resigned immediately. But unlike several others who would be hired and fired by the defendants throughout the trial, he did not simply quit. He summed up his knowledge of Yousef and his own predicament in a brief statement that he delivered before a group of reporters.

I fear the words I am about to speak would further confirm Mr. Amin’s distrust in me, yet I am compelled to speak them. I cannot allow criminals to rob me of my humanity by preventing me from doing what’s right, no matter the price. Now that I no longer represent Yousef Amin, I can give my true assessment of him and the bind in which he finds himself. Mr. Amin is a pawn in the hands of Iran’s fanatical regime which, even in prison and courtroom, keeps its firm grip on him. I know that I am breaking my client’s confidence by speaking so, but my greater duty is to the truth.

Respectfully
,

Luther Bunegart

A new counsel was quickly assigned to Yousef, but Yousef’s conduct did not change. His judges seemed to be sitting not at the bench, but in a bulletproof cage across from his own. The charge he most earnestly repudiated was not murdering four men but collaborating with the investigators.
After five days of testimony, when it became clear that he could not undo his earlier confessions, he gloomily returned to his seat.

Darabi and Rhayel took the stand next, but they refused to answer any questions and were dismissed within minutes.

“Can they get away with this?” Shohreh whispered to Ehrig, who assented with a nod. The less the accused spoke, the more terrified she grew. She felt besieged from every corner. To her left and right were the attorneys she hardly knew. Behind her and before her, men whom she feared and loathed perched in two glass cages. She saw their silence as a sign of their power and became ever more certain that something would soon end the trial, perhaps a deal, perhaps a bomb. She diligently recorded the details of the proceedings, as if her notes were all that were to remain of the trial. Her hand was busy throughout the day, running across the pages of her pad, hardly leaving any margins for the occasional exclamation and question marks—the rare signs of her own reflections. In the moments of quiet, during the recesses, she found time to interject a line or two in parentheses, a commentary summed up in an expletive. She remained faithful to the exchanges, meticulously punctuating her sentences, noting the times of the testimonies down to the minute, peeking over the translators’ shoulders to check for the spelling of unfamiliar names. Unlike the judges, she was not keeping these notes for some future deliberation. All she wanted was to know the details of her husband’s death. She wanted to bear his history, the way she had once borne his progeny.